A passionate duck hunter voices concerns about teal season

[triplecurler]

That is part of the shift in thought process. I'd like to see a noon closure on all WPA's and WMA's. Guys could still hunt public lakes and private land till dark. Could lead to a lot better hunting in general, if birds could rest on huntable water. It's not giant leaps, but even small changes are changes and tough for the old guard to understand. Especially when they are grounded in their ruts and that those ruts are right, no matter what.

Noon closure on just WMA and WPA has to be the dumbest chit I have ever heard. Maybe a noon closure on everything but WMA and WPA. Hell I'm trying to think of a WPA that is anywhere near me that I could even duck hunt and only know a handful of WMA that is huntable for ducks.

Team Power Dump

Why even open it at all in the areas? If closing down part of the week is good, then all week should be better. Think about it.

[gimpfinger]

That is part of the shift in thought process. I'd like to see a noon closure on all WPA's and WMA's. Guys could still hunt public lakes and private land till dark. Could lead to a lot better hunting in general, if birds could rest on huntable water. It's not giant leaps, but even small changes are changes and tough for the old guard to understand. Especially when they are grounded in their ruts and that those ruts are right, no matter what.

Noon closure on just WMA and WPA has to be the dumbest chit I have ever heard. Maybe a noon closure on everything but WMA and WPA. Hell I'm trying to think of a WPA that is anywhere near me that I could even duck hunt and only know a handful of WMA that is huntable for ducks.

Team Power Dump

Why even open it at all in the areas? If closing down part of the week is good, then all week should be better. Think about it.

Kinda my point trip, any closure is dumb as chit when the birds don't want to hang out here anyway.

Team Power Dump

[get-n-birdy]

Change is a hard thing to grasp or accept for Minnesotan waterfowl hunters. We need to manage our public areas for better harvest opportunities. The overall, traditional thought process dealing with regulations and tweety bird, sunrise glue sniffers idealism is idiotic. There's better ways to do things, and those ways may buck a lot of long rutted in traditions.

[Trigger]

Change is a hard thing to grasp or accept for Minnesotan waterfowl hunters. We need to manage our public areas for better harvest opportunities. The overall, traditional thought process dealing with regulations and tweety bird, sunrise glue sniffers idealism is idiotic. There's better ways to do things, and those ways may buck a lot of long rutted in traditions.

As a former preacher of "You don't flock with tradition" type, I agree with this 100%. For some reason guys use tradition as a reason to keep out of date rules in place, or to fight any change simply because change will- in their eyes- mess everything up, as if what we have now is good. The rules and regulations are not the tradition, hunting ducks is the tradition. Shooting ducks. Eating ducks (for some people). Keeping things as they are, going out and sitting in a boat with no ducks to shoot is a bad way to maintain tradition.

[Fish Felon]

Noon closure on just WMA and WPA has to be the dumbest chit I have ever heard. Maybe a noon closure on everything but WMA and WPA. Hell I'm trying to think of a WPA that is anywhere near me that I could even duck hunt and only know a handful of WMA that is huntable for ducks.

Team Power Dump

Why even open it at all in the areas? If closing down part of the week is good, then all week should be better. Think about it.

Kinda my point trip, any closure is dumb as chit when the birds don't want to hang out here anyway.

Team Power Dump

I disagree.

We have plenty of areas that consist of quality habitat with plenty of feed. The reason they don't hold more birds is simple; disturbance.

I wouldn't be in favor of a noon a closure, anywhere. Note: notice that I didn't say I was against it. Too often we make a war out of suggestions for something that we all want to see improved.

I think a noon closure would be almost pointless. Taking an area that gets too much pressure and only limiting the trampling of it to the mornings would not make it hold that many more ducks than it is holding now.


What I'd like to see, and how I'd manage my estate if I was lucky enough to win the powerball, and what will never happen is this;

Take a grouping of land, be it wpa's, wma's, game lakes, a mix of them, etc., and assign them colors. Red, Blue, and Yellow. Map it out so they're distributed equally and so you don't have a bunch of yellows in one area or blues in another...

Red areas would be open to hunting all week.
Blue areas would be open to hunting on weekends and Wednesdays.
Yellow areas would be open Monday & Tuesday and Thursday & Friday.

Then cycle them every year so they rotate. I.E. the next year they'd be...

Yellow areas would be open to hunting all week.
Red areas would be open to hunting on weekends and Wednesdays.
Blue areas would be open Monday & Tuesday and Thursday & Friday.

...and so forth. That way some guy wouldn't have his favorite honey hole shutdown on weekends forever and piss and moan about it.


What we have now are areas that are either open to hunting all the friggin' time or never (refuges). What we need are places that are shutdown long enough to let birds use them and and hone in on them. Spots they've rested at and fed long enough to where when you push them off going in and setting up they want to come back instead of fly to Missouri.

It's not rocket science. It cracked me up the past couple years when the south zone reopened after the split and guys were like, "It was as good as opener!" Well no shit...it was an opener. But who the hell wants to not hunt for two weeks during October? Not this guy.


I've been fortunate enough in my time and travels to hunt some pretty awesome shit, with some of those places and hunts being in MN (we call those exceptions to the rule). It might sound elementary but I can't say I've ever seen a spot loaded with ducks right after a guy just finished wrapping up his decoys. Sure, I've hunted the same place a couple days in a row and even shot limits doing so a handful of time (also exceptions to the rule) but that's not the norm and those scenarios either occurred in places with lots more ducks and much less pressure, were a result of an otherworldly migration or some phenomenon, were a total fluke, or all the above. No one should point to those type of scenarios and use them as evidence to why we shouldn't manage what we have a lot better than we currently are.

[gimpfinger]

I can name dozens of lakes around me that hold zero ducks and they never get hunted. Mud holes that are managed for walleye that have ten walleye in them and thousands of carp, bullhead and minnows. Wasted money. Pull the stupid aerators and within ten years if that sw mn would hold piles of birds again. A simple fix that would cost near nothing to do and maybe piss off fifty fishermen. Any closure to help hold birds that are not here is like using a bandaid to heal a compound fracture.

I was out a lot of weekdays the last few seasons and I'll tell you this it's not the hunting pressure over here as to why there isn't birds hanging around.

Team Power Dump

[lanyard]

Gimp, you have a fish and game type club there that "stocks" the walleyes?

I know of one south of you. seems they spend a lot of money to keep walleyes in several lakes with maximum depth of about 8'. Aerator doesn't due too bad holding geese though!

[gimpfinger]

Gimp, you have a fish and game type club there that "stocks" the walleyes?

I know of one south of you. seems they spend a lot of money to keep walleyes in several lakes with maximum depth of about 8'. Aerator doesn't due too bad holding geese though!

There are a few but most is dnr stocking of lakes 10 foot deep or less. Money wasted.

Team Power Dump

[get-n-birdy]

The crux of the issue for waterfowl hunters as a whole in Minnesota, is we all know there is little actual management, be it biological or habitat related, happening on the ground on even a marginal scale. What we have, is what we've had for a long time. A few simple changes, like getting ride of aerators, minnows and possibly creating more hunt-able conditions to shoot birds, through whatever worked and having a more open mindset to things outside of the decades old standby's would be a good place to start. Shooting birds is part of waterfowl hunting. Without it, it takes away the need for a gun in hand. We have to many poetic, idealistic writers in this state, that view harvesting birds as a bad thing. That is a big sore spot for me and long term, that excessively negative attitude, is actually very detrimental to the heritage of hunting in general.

[gimpfinger]

That's what boggles my mind. If you would get rid of half the aerators in southern mn I'm betting in 5-10 years the amount of birds produced and holding here in the fall would be 100 fold. With relatively zero dollars spent.

If you talk to old timers that have lived around some of these "lakes" they tell stories of how half the lake was covered in cattails and bullrushes. Even wild rice on some. That are move wide open with near zero cover along the shore. All tell the same story "before the aerator" there used to be...

Team Power Dump